The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

I knew exactly what this meant. He was living at home in Surry Hills with his parents at the start of the Second World War. Everyone was edgy. Windows were blacked out. Australia waited to be attacked.

  Then, in the early hours of a crisp spring morning, the street came under fire. Was it a machine gun? A fighter plane? Shells lobbed in from the harbour off an enemy warship?

  No, it was Grandpa’s stash of home-brewed beer going off in the back shed. It was the day the blitz came to a narrow street in the inner-city, albeit under a fusillade of sugar, yeast and tin caps.

  That’s what my father remembered with clarity, the moment before he left this world.

  Why did he retrieve that particular card from his life file? And how, sitting in the car outside the Surfers Paradise apartment building of the late Hubert Dunkle Junior, did I know that I had seen this place before? Not in situ. And not the exact building that now occupied the address — a gleaming twenty-one-storey superstructure, hardly five years old. But the street, and the gnarled old pandanus trees up and down the footpath, and the saggy fibro beach shack to the left of the modern apartment building, its walls moulded, the points of its spiky, rusted television aerial decorated by some drunken wags with empty beer stubbies?

  Where have I seen you? I asked myself in the car. How do I know you?

  My detective mate was waiting in the posh foyer, beside a little trickling fountain.

  He flicked his head for me to follow, and once we were in the lift he pressed the button for the nineteenth floor.

  The lift carriage was mirrored on three sides. Big, fat, red, scarred coppers’ mugs stretching back to the dawn of time. We were not one of the world’s more attractive professions.

  ‘You retired how long ago?’ he asked me.

  ‘About four years,’ I said.

  ‘From Sydney, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thought you’d come up here, catch a bit of sun?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Throw in a lazy line?’

  ‘Spot on.’

  ‘And that was you last year, right? Nearly got your head blown off at City Hall?’

  ‘I’m the man.’

  ‘And the year before? Got thrown out of a high-rise office building in Brisbane?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Now you’re linked to a murder scene by a forty-year-old diary?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘You got a funny way of retiring. ‘

  ‘Side-splitting, innit?’ I said.

  The elevator door opened. ‘Second on your left,’ the detective said.

  I was fumbling for my sunglasses on that short walk to Hubert Dunkle Junior’s apartment. What was it with these new Gold Coast buildings? It was as sunny inside them as out, all glass and blinding white surfaces and brushed metal.

  One of the nineteenth-floor residents, a painfully thin old lady in crisp leopard-spotted knickerbockers, a head scarf and sunglasses the size of saucers you might fill with milk for your kitty-cat, scurried past towards the lifts, busy as an over-tanned hen, all cluck and clack on the tiled floor. In the glare she had almost completely dissolved, a blur of wrinkled alligator skin and gold. She left trailing behind her the faint aroma of burned hair.

  I stepped into Junior’s abode and the moment I crossed the threshold I got that old, tingling feeling that detectives never lose. The thrill. The exhilaration of a fresh crime; struggling against the pity of it all. The rush of seeing, and then really seeing. The perversely enjoyable effort of decoding the perverse human brain. Stepping through the immediate dimension. The ordinary suddenly extraordinary. The commonplace a priceless treasure. You gotta be there.

  I didn’t even notice the uniform copper standing guard just inside the door.

  ‘Who you?’ he grunted.

  ‘Who me?’ I said, brushing past him. ‘Screw you.’ I could be terribly adolescent at times.

  ‘Oi,’ he said, in the way that so many males on the Gold Coast aged between ten and forty said ‘Oi.’

  I ignored him.

  I stood at the entrance to the lounge room and took in the scene. My mate quietly joined me.

  ‘Waddya reckon?’ he said, hands on hips.

  I lamented the days of old Obe, and the power of silence in detective work. Nothing today seemed to happen without ceaseless noise, chatter, music, aimless discussion, moronic pleasantries and twaddle. I despised twaddle. I was twaddle’s number one public enemy.

  I sighed like a set of old leather bellows. No one could go for a walk these days without listening to something on headphones. Or talking on the phone. Or texting. Or tweeting. Good lord, don’t talk to me about tweeting after last year’s fiasco. It wasn’t that nobody stopped to think any more. People’s lives were so full of static, and movement and distraction, they had no time to think. And thinking is like exercise. Do it, or lose it.

  ‘Could you, as my Great-Aunt Petunia used to say, close your cakehole for a moment?’ I asked my detective friend.

  ‘Oi,’ the copper by the door snorted.

  He was a regular porcine doorbell.

  ‘And could you get Porky over there to vacate the sty for a few minutes?’ I asked.

  My haughtiness was out of line. I was long retired, had no official role in the investigation and hadn’t even been invited as a casual observer. My opinions meant nothing.

  But this was Obe’s boy, Junior. And it was my old police diary sitting slap-bang in the middle of his blood-spattered bachelor pad.

  Splattered was an understatement. Someone had decided to completely redecorate Junior’s walls. There were great tendrils of crimson spray criss-crossing both lounge-room walls, blood spots across the ceiling, the plasma television, the spectacularly bad oil painting of pelicans at feeding time. There were pools of the stuff on the carpet, continents of it on the pastel cloth-covered couches and a great wheel of it across the open granite kitchen bench. Some flecks had even made it to the fridge at the back of the kitchen, and onto Junior’s handwritten shopping list magnetised to the door. A perfect pinpoint of blood had alighted between ‘cabbage’ and ‘bread’.

  I stood there for a long time, and another feeling passed through my weary frame. Something wasn’t right. There was blood here, but I couldn’t feel death. I don’t know how to explain it. You can add up the facts, Obe used to say, but they don’t always equal the truth.

  I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  I heard a distant ‘Oi’ again from beyond the front door.

  I poked my head into junior’s impossibly neat bedroom, stepped in, looked through his closets. The whole place felt unlived in. I joined the other detectives in Junior’s study. It had a pleasant view of the beach. I scanned the bookshelves.

  Finally, I stood in front of his desk and stared down at my open police diary from the wonderful and tragic year of 1972. It was mine all right, and had aged as I had. It was weathered, discoloured and creaky at the spine.

  21 July, 6.47 pm.

  I looked up suddenly and the glare hurt my eyes. That’s when I remembered when I’d been here before.

  ~ * ~

  3

  IT WAS AFTER nine in the evening when the coppers pulled up stumps at poor Junior’s bachelor pad. My detective mate called me immediately and I dropped back to the scene for some quiet contemplation.

  ‘Keep your grubby mitts off everything,’ he told me as he left, ‘or it’s my job. And lock up on your way out.’

  ‘You’re a good man,’ I said to him. i’ll have you stuffed and mounted for this.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said.

  It was a different apartment at night. All soft and moody. The lights of the Surfers metropolis twinkled through the glass. Glass everywhere you looked. It was a monument to transparency. It was the Gold Coast. So much glass, for a place with so many secrets.

  Of course, I had come back to the flat for the police diary. Naturally I planned to take it. I had to. It was mine, and it had something to do
with Junior’s death.

  Or did it?

  Against all protocol, I had kept a few of my diaries from my years as a detective in Sydney, and secreted them into retirement. Who would miss them?

  If caught with this worthless police property, I would claim they were important to me for a potential future autobiography. I can hear my imaginary interrogator groan at the thought — what, another cop-on-the-inside-big-belly-under-the-belly book about the bloody seventies, full of flares and bad hair and officers that all looked and sounded like Bill Hunter?

  But there was another very good reason the diaries were under my wing, and it was all because of Obe. One of the first things he taught me was how to write a police diary.

  ‘I know how to write,’ I said, upstart of a young thing that I was.

  ‘Not like this,’ Obe said.

  Every diary, he told me, had to contain brief daily summaries of police duties, no matter how mundane, right? But in every police force there is a parallel narrative going on. The things you see but don’t see. The conversations you hear but can’t repeat. The friendships you notice, the connections you see forming, even the very language police use with each other. A threat can be an invitation. A kindly phrase a threat. An innocuous query a test.

  So Obe taught me, with an ingenious code of his own devising, how to embed a truthful observation of police life beneath the record of phone calls made and paperwork completed and interviews typed. For a period before and after Obe’s death, my diaries were halls of mirrors.

  At the time, they could have meant the difference between life and death. Mine, that is. Decades later, I took them. Better safe than sorry.

  And there was a name in one of those diaries, too, that had come back to me just a few hours earlier. The name of a young woman who had lived at the precise address as Hubert Dunkle Junior, albeit forty years earlier.

  She was Susan Haag, and she had once resided in an orange-brick block of flats called the Ace Royale apartments, which had stood where Junior’s swish high-rise now towered. At police headquarters in Sydney around 1971 I had seen photographs of the street, and the flats, and inside Susan’s specific flat, and then inside Susan’s bedroom. And I had seen photographs of Susan’s naked body on her bed, and a bottle of Scotch and empty pill bottles on her bedside table.

  Susan Haag’s death was, you see, a very big deal for a time in Sydney. Various combinations of detectives flew back and forth from the Gold Coast, investigating her suicide. Dozens of witnesses were questioned. An inquest was held. She was deemed to have taken her own life.

  But that’s not how I remembered it. And it’s not what I wrote, in code, in my 1972 diary.

  Funny thing, memory, I thought as I sat back in Junior’s accommodating desk chair, and contemplated the coincidence.

  A young woman, supposedly a prostitute, had died at this address almost forty years ago. I had made a few notes about it from what I’d heard and seen in Sydney. Now, as an older man and standing at the border of that strange country where you wear giant diapers and eat runny food and sit all day in your pyjamas amongst strangers trying to remember what the devil your name is, I was back in the same spot, trying to work out who would kill my mentor’s son.

  Did Susan Haag have anything to do with Junior? He would have been eleven years old when she popped those pills in her mouth and chug-a-lugged half a bottle of Scotch on her way to eternity.

  What if nothing had anything to do with anything, and I already had half a foot in the Land of Ga Ga?

  ‘Talk to me, Obe,’ I said into the dark study, and the chair beneath me issued a long, mournful creak.

  ‘I’m going to call the police,’ a dry voice said.

  ‘Obe? Is that a joke?’ I asked of nobody.

  ‘No, it’s not a joke. I’m going to call the police.’

  I swivelled around in the chair, and there was the human alligator handbag, the neighbour, Madame Mutton, who I’d seen in the corridor earlier in the day.

  ‘Pipe down,’ I said. ‘I am the police.’

  ‘You don’t look like the police.’

  ‘And you don’t look like Sophia Loren.’

  ‘Are you always this rude?’

  ‘Always. Even when I’m asleep.’

  ‘You might want to get up off your backside then and find that lovely boy.’

  ‘Junior?’

  ‘He was a good boy.’

  Junior had been fifty-three, so for this super-tanned Dolly Varden to call him a ‘boy’ just showed you how old she was.

  ‘How long you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘He’d only been here six weeks. Real neighbourly, he was. Not like the rest of them in here. All fillum people in here. In and out. Naked parties in the spa. The drugs and all.’

  ‘Did you say fillum?’

  ‘Fillum. The cinema. I can’t keep track. But Mr Dunkle was a real gentleman.’

  I caught her looking over my shoulder at a photograph in a frame on the desk. It was a shot of Senior and Junior, in happier days. Days when both of them were alive.

  Obe was dressed in his uniform. And little Junior was attired in his own specially made policeman’s outfit. It must have been taken just months before Obe died. Junior had that little twig of hair in the picture, too.

  In the picture Obe’s eyes were, of course, huge behind the spectacles. They were kind eyes. Sharp as razors, but kind. There was love there too, with little Junior by his side. These were not the eyes of a man about to blow his brains out.

  But I didn’t share any of that with Dolly.

  ‘He have any visitors lately?’

  ‘He kept to himself from what I could see.’

  ‘No lady friends? Gents?’

  ‘He cooked me dinner twice. Lovely it was. Made the pasta himself Not many young men these days who bother to make their own pasta.’

  ‘Or make their own beds,’ I said, nodding.

  I got up to leave. The swivel chair seemed to issue a groan of relief as I rose to my feet. I slipped the diary into the large pockets of my cargo pants. Little Dolly seemed to have fallen into a quiet reverie. She had made in Junior a new friend here in the gulag of her apartment building, and he had just as quickly been snatched from her. Poor Dolly.

  ‘Time to lock up,’ I said, turning her brittle shoulders around, nudging her to the door. She still smelled of burned hair. Something glittered between the furrows of her old neck.

  She stood and waited in the hallway while I locked up.

  ‘You take care, then,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’ she asked quietly, her voice a fragile breath of breeze in the lonely corridor. I had forgotten about all the bachelorettes out there in the world.

  ‘Maybe some other time,’ I said.

  I thought of sad Dolly for about three seconds as the lift descended. I had greater riddles to solve in this crazy universe of ours.

  I had to get to my storage cage in Nerang out the back of the Coast to see if anyone had helped themselves to my once-secret, now very public, police diary archive, down amongst the silverfishes.

  ~ * ~

  4

  This is how well my wife Peg knows me, how familiar she is with my louche habits, general all-round grubbiness, forgetfulness and, quite clearly, my dreary predictability. I was an ever-expanding continent that she had traced and mapped many, many times, and there was no nook and cranny of me she hadn’t, sometimes disgustingly, come across.

  I sat in the car outside the Ali Baba Self Storage facilities in an industrial estate in Nerang and phoned her on my mobile. She answered after one ring.

  ‘Just promise me you won’t get shot, bound, gagged, thrown from a window or tossed from a boat tonight. ‘

  ‘I could be ringing to see if you need milk and bread.’

  ‘You have never phoned to ask if I need milk or bread.’

  ‘I could be in hospital having suffered a heart attack.’

  ‘You have not suffered a heart attack a
nd you are nowhere near a hospital. You are investigating a murder, someone called Carbunkle. I saw you on the news.’

  ‘It’s Dunkle. Junior. You saw me on the news?’

  ‘I saw your belly on the news.’

  ‘My belly?’

  ‘They showed some police standing outside an apartment building and your belly was poking into the frame.’

  ‘You recognised me by my belly?’